Before I met Anthony Bliss, the book collector, and before I knew that at the Bancroft Library on UC Berkeley's campus it would be possible for me to touch the earliest printed books by Euclid and Tycho Brahe-before I knew I could touch, with my naked fingertips, an 800-year-old Bible that had been hand-drawn by crow's quill, and another whose select pages are studded with knobby bits of red or green parchment, twisted and dipped in ceiling wax and adhered to the book to make an index as you slide the pages one over the next and turn them, one over the next-before I knew any of this I was in Sacramento. I was in Sacramento and at the time I didn't know about the book collection at the Bancroft. I didn't know about the collection that sits on shelves there and gets paged through by students or whomever. Nor did I know about the collection that happens during most working hours, via chats between Mr. Bliss and professors about what's hot, via overseas phone calls and Internet mining excursions. All this bustling and stasis and research had happened without my knowing it during the four years I was an undergraduate on the same campus. All the activity and wealth may as well have been underground and it started at Cal in 1905, long before I did. The Bancroft contains over sixty million manuscripts. It houses twenty-three thousand maps. And there is more. At the Bancroft, refrigerated rooms hum in the dark at 50 degrees Fahrenheit to keep bookworms from boring their soft bodies through bindings to look for fish protein in the glue.

I did not collect many things growing up in Sacramento. A part of me hates the idea of collecting things. Records, CDs, books, DVDs-it is possible to collect plenty of them. You have to narrow it down, of course. Hip-hop from the 1980s. Sci-fi hip-hop from the 1980s. One can be a completist about basically anything. Every publication by Michael Ondaatje, ever. It is also possible to gather a collection for the wrong reasons. As a boy growing up in Sacramento I collected Magic: The Gathering cards. I remember going to Denio's auction and flea market in Roseville under absurd heat with my dad and brother searching for certain rare and uncommon cards. There would be rows of booths out in the hot parking lot and tables and glassy cases inside warehouses where I might find what I was looking for, or something else. I suppose I didn't collect them purely for collection's sake, because the cards could be used to play a game. But the fever and afterglow of a good buy or trade is probably about the same. I enshrined the better of my cards in individual plastic sleeves. I kept a log of my trades in a hand-sized notebook with Garfield on its cover, and if looking over it I was reminded that I had really ripped someone off, just ripped him off hard, I would exalt with a kind of dark zeal and relish my own guilt at sticking it to the poor guy so bad. Then I would return to the business of organizing my cards in plastic sleeves. I had two binders. Nine cards to a sheet, per side. One binder was white and you could put a drawing on the cover behind thin clear plastic, and the other featured an erroneous aluminum bat sparking a baseball like a piece of flint.

If I had a million dollars, what should I collect?

As a boy growing up in Sacramento I didn't collect river rocks, except one. After a time he got returned, and then lost somewhere along the bank of the American.